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Any reviewer tackling Luigi’s Mansion 3 faces a colossal challenge. Here’s the problem: the central mechanic of this experience revolves around Luigi’s back-mounted vacuum cleaner, the Poultergust G-00. It’s a joy to use, underpinning every interaction you have in the game, gleefully inhaling detritus, sending it flying all over the lovingly crafted environment. And so how do we write about this without devolving into an endless stream of jokes about sucking and blowing? Because it’s true! The most important thing about this game, the thing that makes it what it is, is that the sucking just feels really, really good. And not just the sucking! The blowing, too. That’s the salient fact here! Oh well, I’ve already used “inhaling”, so time to open up a few thesaurus tabs and muddle through.

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is one of Nintendo’s two largest releases this year, or three if you count Pokémon Sword and Shield as two different games. It’s the first game in the series that I’ve played, and I have a feeling I’m not alone: previous iterations hit 3DS and Gamecube, and this is Luigi’s first time headlining a major fall release on a flagship console, and as a result he’s got a bit more attention than he usually does. Which is good news, because this game is a gem: Luigi’s Mansion 3 is everything you want from a fall Nintendo release, a warm blanket in a troubled world.

Here’s the setup: we are not in a mansion, despite the title. We’re in a hotel along with Mario, Peach and a handful of Toads. The fact that the proprietors are obviously ghosts does not seem to bother us until, surprise, they kidnap all our friends and force us, the cowardly Luigi, to steel ourselves and rescue our friends and family. With the help of friendly scientist E. Gadd as well as our friendly ghost dog Poulterpup we must battle and puzzle our way through 17 ghost-infested floors. These start simple, like a lobby, a restaurant, or a hallway with hotel rooms in it. Pretty soon we’re working with floors that contain an ancient Egyptian tomb, a pirate’s grotto, a medieval jousting tournament, etc. Each level has a simple progression of puzzles punctuated by fights with themed ghosts, and the inevitable boss fight.

Those levels are the star of the show, and they’re every bit as meticulous, joyful and beautiful as you’d expect from Nintendo. The basic puzzles are satisfying and smooth, but they’re also stocked with secret gems to come back and collect for an extended playthrough. And they’re stocked with metric tons of detritus: cups and plants, plates, bathrobes, rubber duckies, suits of armor and whatever else: you arrive on scene with your Poultergust and just suck, er “draw” everything in site, turning each carefully arranged scene into a maelstrom of whirling chaos. It’s gorgeous. Each one feels like as much of a different world as if we were playing Super Mario Odyssey, and that’s saying something.

You’ll gain a limited number of powerups along the way, including the ability to shoot out plungers that you can then yank for an added level of chaos. The powerup that deserves the most attention, however, is most certainly Gooigi, a version of Luigi made out of goo, possessing all of Luigi’s powers in addition the ability to move through grates and cold, dead eyes. He’s presented in that wonderfully Nintendo way, where really all that happens is you go talk to E. Gadd and he says something along the lines of “good news! Now we have Gooigi.”

Gooigi is used as you’d expect him to be: to access secret areas, sometimes, and mostly for co-op style puzzles where he activates a switch so Luigi can go through, or something like that. He can be controlled in co-op, but all of it works perfectly well in single-player as well.

But while Gooigi has already won hearts and minds, it’s Luigi that really takes his moment in the spotlight. Unlike his heroic cypher of a brother, Luigi is positively dripping with personality: terrified at all times, jumping at the site of a cabinet, ready to take up arms to save his brother but clearly totally unprepared for the task. No matter how many ghost fights he has successfully navigated during his time in the hotel, he seems convinced that this next one is going to be it for him. He is surprised every time the elevator button jumps out of his hands and screws itself in automatically. When his brother collects a star(or moon) and celebrates in other games, it’s always with a sort of casual: “of course I got that star”. When Luigi takes a brief moment to congratulate himself after a fight, he seems to be saying: “oh my God I can’t believe I’m not dead”. You just love to see it.

Luigi's Mansion 3

credit: nintendo

Okay, so the controls are weak:

The game isn’t perfect: the controls are, in a word, bad. It operates sort of like a dual analog shooter in that one stick controls the character and the other one controls his weapon. The problem is that we have a fixed third-person perspective, and so actually trying to aim the Poultergust 3000 can feel like something out of an old-school Resident Evil game, which is to say something that went out of style over a decade ago. It makes any sort of precision movement with the thing tricky at best.

There is a kind of narrative argument for this awkwardness, which is that Luigi is useless and can barely control this machine, and I found that argument actually helped turn a hindrance into a perfectly pleasant joke. The controls are passable enough that they don’t cause much trouble throughout the majority of the game, but they tend to let you down in demanding moments. You’ll notice it any time you need to aim your vacuum up and down under pressure, to be sure. One level that has you navigating a flooded boiler room by blowing yourself around on an inflatable pool toy is fine so long as you’re just wonking around, but quickly turns maddening when the game introduces some obstacles into the mix.

The same is true of the combat, which can be a mixed bag. There are some truly inspired boss fights, which is a sentence I rarely type. And the fighting against rank-and-file ghosts is totally fine so long as it comes as an occasional punctuation amidst traversal and puzzle solving, but a few sequences with a whole lot more combat grow tiresome, quickly. When the puzzles turn challenging this game sings, but when the combat turns challenging you often feel you’re fighting the controls more than anything else.

But I rarely found those problems overwhelming, even if they do disqualify this from a perfect score.

Really, you just love to see it:

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is a little like Control, the sort of game that you don’t see as often as you used to but cling to when you can. It is a contained, crafted experience, no more and no less than a professional, clean and near-perfect execution of an idea that you already like. It is not shockingly new or transcendent, but you don’t always want that. It is relentlessly charming, consistently charming, and punctuated in every moment by the sheer joy of sucking. When the weather turns cold, pop this one in and imagine the troubles of the world gone, at least for a few hours.

There are also multiplayer modes, both competitive and co-op, and they seem like perfectly solid additions to the story-mode, which is clearly the meat of the experience. I haven’t spent a huge amount of time with these, and this review is mostly about the main story game.

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Release Date: October 31, 2019

Price: $59.99

Score: 9 out of 10

A digital review code was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.

I'm a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, IGN.com, Wired and more. I cover social games, video games,

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I'm a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, IGN.com, Wired and more. I cover social games, video games, technology and that whole gray area that happens when technology and consumers collide. Google